Shame, Family Honor, and Dating Abuse: Lessons From an Exploratory Study of South Asian Muslims

Abstract

Generally, South Asian Muslim communities reject dating and view it as shameful. Despite this, many South Asian Muslims still engage in dating. These traditional norms, however, remain influential and a part of the cultural context in which dating abuse occurs. This exploratory study examines South Asian Muslims’ perceptions of how cultural norms forbidding dating and constructing it as shameful may affect women’s experiences of dating abuse. Findings indicate these cultural norms may prompt fear of parental and community reactions to dating as well as strong relationship attachment. These then have implications for disclosure, help seeking, and ending abusive relationships.

Dating Violence in an Urban Turkish Context: Listening to Young People from an Intersectional Perspective

“…In such families, those young women who ventured into dating in secret faced threats of being disclosed and dishonored by their boyfriends and feared ensuing punishments and restrictions their fathers could impose on them. Their experiences are very similar to other women who date in traditional and religious contexts where women's dating is disapproved and their sexual purity is valued, and report fears and concerns about community and family reactions to DV and helpseeking (Couture-Carron, 2017, 2020Shen, 2011). A similar tension between dating decisions and contextual norms is described by those young women who explored sexuality, on the one hand, and experienced some implicit forms of discrimination such as rumors and judgments in their social circles, or faced threats of being exposed by their boyfriends, on the other.…”

“…This perspective argues that violence is not the same for all women, and investigates how women’s experience of and responses to violence are shaped by their intersecting social positions and contexts (Bograd, 1999; Nixon & Humphreys, 2010; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). Besides a few notable exceptions (Couture-Carron, 2017, 2020; Roberts et al, 2018), intersectional thinking has not been fully utilized in the literature, despite its potential to expand our understanding of DV and inform preventive interventions targeting diverse youth. The present study aims to address this gap in an urban Turkish context by adopting an intersectional perspective to explore how young college men and women make sense of and experience DV, to identify variations among them and to investigate how it can inform DV prevention practices.…”

“…When applied to DV, an intersectional lens raises the question of whether young people comprise a unitary group and whether the term DV entails similar experiences and viewpoints for them. In the literature, an accumulating body of work has started to address these questions and went beyond gender to examine DV in relation to race (Foshee et al, 2005; Henry & Zeytinoglu, 2012), social class (Sanhueza & Lessard, 2018), immigration (Smokowski et al, 2009), ethnicity, culture and religion (Couture-Carron, 2017, 2020; Malhotra et al, 2015). These studies have pointed out that young people’s gendered social contexts operate as an “interactional and structural reality” (White, 2009, p. 12) which shape their views and experiences of DV and create unique processes and challenges in their encounters with it (Smith et al, 2009; Zurbriggen, 2009).…”

“…According to recent research, one such reality pertains to cultural and religious restrictions imposed on women’s dating, particularly in groups where preserving women’s sexual purity before marriage is a highly valued and controlled social custom. Several studies reported how young women’s experiences of DV was complicated by these societal expectations and demonstrated their lack of willingness to disclose DV out of concerns over protecting family honor, bringing shame to family, and facing negative reactions from their community (Couture-Carron, 2017, 2020; Helm et al, 2017; Ragavan et al, 2021; Shen, 2011). A similar challenge experienced by immigrant and acculturating youth, especially women, was related to the difficulty of negotiating disparate societal expectations in the original and host cultures with respect to dating, sexuality, and violence (Black & Weisz, 2005), and increased risk of DV when they divert from traditional norms by engaging in sexual activity (Silverman et al, 2007).…”

Male Violence Against Women: An Exploratory Study of Its Manifestations, Causes, and Discrepancies over Jordanian Women under Corona Pandemic

“…The husband or the man is the focus of family authority (Barakat, 2011) and (Omar 2010), Under the rule of unequal relationships, forms of domestic violence that affect women specifically, such as anger, restriction, coercion, prohibition, expulsion, beating, threatening, and killing are produced. Accordingly, many cases of violence against women in our societies are linked to cultural standers and norms that prohibit women from foreign relations, especially sexual or romantic relations, and even consider them a "shameful disgrace" (Carron, 2020). Crimes affecting the family are classified in the culture of Arab societies, and everyone reveres the customary value of "family honour."…”